Okay, I broke Star Wars:Outlaw. Now a bug, I did something you’re not supposed to do: I managed to hit a hole and fall into the nether world of behind the facade.
Let me explain: the world of games is fiction. It’s all a clever one-sided floating island in a void. Everything you see and “touch” has a front and no back. Gravity as such doesn’t exist (well, it does but it’s also fake as it is linear which is why waterfalls look funny).
1/2
2/2 Everything is a jumble of surface that, for the most part, are unbreakable.
Remember fake gravity? Well there is fake collisions and that’s where shit falls apart. In this game you have. Speeder bike. It goes real fast. I was using it to intentionally take out Stormtroopers. And there was a rock. I have sucky reactions and hit the rock. Due to collision testing NOT being instantaneous (unlike real life) I went through the rock and ended up falling… oops!
This is a well known problem with software: “Don’t do it that way, it will break!” or “I never tested for that”—you would be surprised at the number of problems engineers DON’T test because they don’t try to break their software.
As such, bugs (or problems) fall into a blind spot.
I got stuck in a box yesterday. How? There was a space between two boxes.The physics engine fought so hard to prevent me from going through that it couldn’t keep up and I slipped through the box. 1/2
Since the box was on TOP of the terrain I didn’t fall into hell. But because there was limited space I couldn’t break out. The physics engine doesn’t understand inside/outside, just boundaries. Go fast enough or bounce around competing boundaries and you will slip through (physics is computed on a time slice basis—go too far before the slice and you end up on the other side).
The only game I’ve never been able to do this with is Final Fantasy 14.
@feloneouscat
In 1980 I did this on a the most advanced flight simulator in the Navy. I was testing a radar effect (I worked on the Digital Radar Land Mass system), and reset the airplane to 10,000ft at a randomly chosen lat/long. When I took it off pause there was zero radar or visual, then 30 seconds later it crashed.
Took me over an hour to figure out I had reset an A6-E to inside Mt. Rainier. No terrain on the inside, then you fly into the (out) side of a mountain.
Embarrassing, kind of